Herbalism

Okay. This is after HOURS of trying to hammer this thing into some kind of decent shape

Ugh. I've just not been feeling as good as usual about my work lately. This still feels clumsy.

Anyway, I was trying to convey something....hideously complicated and convoluted, and I have a feeling it came off as equally convoluted in writing, but I've hit a point with this piece where I just have to let it go and come back to it for some more editing later.

PS. Mature language warning. Didn't want the cuss words to be a surprise to anyone. And if there's any occasion, to me, when cuss words are called for - it's this one.

"The War of the Ivy and Holly"

We are at war.

We are at silent, stifled war.

We are a waltz,
and I am a quiet Ginger Rogers,
not smiling
for fear of doing or saying too much,
for fear of the wants that eat our garden hearts.

When I travel to you I carry garlic bulbs
to keep me safe, to prevent drowning.

Dancing rings around the rosies
Grabbing pockets full of posies,
What's the point of making nosegays
If they all just fall to ashes?


I grow thistles by my door to tell me
whether you are friend or foe
by the way you catch your clothes,
by the way you curse the spines
within the fingers that pluck them from your jeans.

"Shit" and "Damn it" are safe
and occupied,
like glances,
with something else.


You are a lone figure
rising from a wheat field white with sun,
you are riddles in the dark of my head,
the dark of my mountain cave—
the bay leaf dream sent to me,
uncomfortable and leathery between my teeth.
But true.

At night, you are the holly sprig
at the lintel, keeping the darkness out.

We are at war
in the juniper pauses
where our spirits try to speak
directly to each other,

"Do you remember how I

"Yes I remember, and how I

"Yes. Like the moon."


You bloom in deathly cold,
a capsaicin heat that floods my veins
spiked and chili peppered—
a cool, calm red as you appeared
that night when the fire rose in your eyes.

I try not to climb the cracks
in your brick walls.

You have become, in the early morning,
a kind of silent yearning that stretches
beyond the confines of my nearly-woken dreaming,
across the mists of the Virginia fields between us
stretched out in the yellow light.

You are a new snake
cutting wide streaks
across the gold desert
that ate my garden-heart.